| edged out 7 part 5 - 1983 october | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
[Dream catalogs follow. Having stopped seeing Ellen Tallman I was combing the dreams I had written out for her - every dream for months.] [page of house photo clippings and floorplan sketch] 17th October 1983 The uneasiness with 'drawing' though I loved what she made. It feels too nothing, as though I must be busy finding out not messing like this. What's here today. 'J.' T's talk about drawing. Weather, cold. Color outside. What about her. That she isn't going to partition the house, she wants to move to Strathcona. What will I do. Last night with color pictures imagining the poet's house, the garden, the mother and child house, the wall etc, and in it what was most there was the long (tank) pond with a concrete verge, water lilies. The poet's house put in the corner looking onto it, under dark trees, with Chinese windows. He comes in at night, the garage in the wall, comes out under the trees, goes up a step into his small kitchen, makes a fire that heats upstairs (is she up north?), makes himself a cup of tea, a bowl of something. He's putting off going upstairs because he loves his library so much. The door onto the stairs, the stairs bend up, the south room is walls of shelves, a small fireplace, a chair, a desk. His books are here when he's away. In his bed he can listen to leaves. He can set the ladder to the trapdoor and take his futon on the roof. The bathhouse.
18 The drawings to make little ideal spaces where a love story is going on. Would he be in some way living in them, Siubhne.
Mice snails fishes cats. Bulls, knives - anxiety. From no other instinct are so many and such powerful wishes left over. Disappointed that the beautiful stuff is all sex. And what does it mean. Beating of the wings of panic: is work cancelled. Making love in a material (more.) Oh that we were together and my body feathered too. I won't have the erotic because I want the erotic. The years of sexual craziness. 20th Yesterday in the city the writhing again - in the bus - cold sore - T when I was with her downstairs transferring on - she was going on about C, how she can't stand her - what exactly did she say, Jam was going to move somewhere, then she thought she had begun something here and she would stay, she's going to sell her house and move to Strathcona - I'm going to have to live in the center of her preference for them! I'm going to have to go on feeling how I lost out - or else do what C does and attach myself to a junior - what has her telling me it, done - anguish again - the month from sesshin wasn't - it was dark, it was dark, it felt dark winter. A month to the show, I think. Dreamed - a center (cauldron), round place swarms were in - I can't get it now - it was as if a womb, it was the womb of meaning - there was it and a pole or axis - those were the two concepts. What else from yesterday [visit to Seattle to check about dye transfer prints] - the black pots, very shining, helmet-like, glaze silver rim, on the edge cut-outs of bear, quartz crystal. Wafer tablet with painting on, a glass marble. Could I gold the old screen. Gold and plexi. to have dealt with the betrayal of love sufficiently to release energy and attention "a wholly surrendered" - "inverted" - "narcissistic recoil" I simply sat there and realized what I am. I am reality. The self and nature and support of all things and all beings. The dye transfers and how much they cost. 4x5's. Separations, matrices (from it up to fifty prints). The land description. The frame of ref. Right and left are opposed rather than polarized toward each other. Lives sexually as opposition to others, and independent satisfaction of self. Into the domain of touch. "That condition is blind, it is prior to the usual body sense, organized complexity of inwardness." Skin subtle activity. Achieves its native state and lets you intercourse with radiance freed from the effort of contraction that separates the body at the skin. Universal desire place - all relations contracted - going into it troubles relation - it's sexual madness - narcissistic. When the whole body is enlightened sex is not entertained in itself, it is entertained as expressing the whole body-mind. Presume the disposition of enlightenment. When we enter the whole-bodily into the disposition of surrender to the Life Being the body field is restored - a circle of radiance. The media of the body-mind all provide information qualified by an error of the whole-bodily being at the level of its most basic presentation. our contraction from infinity As soon as people become involved in sex they become disturbed by what they are finding out about it. Extended orgasm - not holding breath and pushing out. trust and willingness to surrender past all her resistance to pleasure love of the two-armed form (Her body is her father.) As narcissus you are in conflict with your body because it's going to die, can involve you in illness, misery. When your body is pleasured you treat it as a lover, when you enter bodily into unwanted circumstances you react as to a person of the opposite sex. You basically have a sex relation with your body, the same relation you have with all persons who are sexually interesting to you. You treat it as an other. In other words, you do not recognize what is arising. You do not stand in the present moment with what is arising. the direct approach of observing the pattern that is rising in every moment One can't enter full sex relation until she notices, by observing all her patterns, knowing herself thoroughly and presuming the position prior to the ego. Stand in that Free Position. Stand in the position of life [?] radiant consciousness. That stance in consciousness loosens every knot. "The feeling of betrayal predominates" where there was no sexual relationship. The sexual persona you are animating is about two years old. You take responsibility. You stand beyond it. The oedipal character is a pattern not a memory. 21st Full of bits - the (library) of memory - theatre - build a place - the man in NY who invented the city nation 'of the future,' who draws it - a loving relation with the animus - my poet as it happens - the as if succession - imaginary - it's fluttering - my poet was - her poet - enter into relation with the animus - the mother and child house where I live but it's the poet's house I'm interested in - her having to make a separate relation to the imaginary, and I, when we became more known - in the compound - Kawabata - the sexual image - troubled by - he must embody for her, says Jung - yes, how is he willing and able - I could - if - "As Narcissus" - he must be the image of my body, that I want - mutation from the striding master. In here I am always also trying to figure her - what is her relation to - what is it to imagine oneself being the man rather than loving the man - it's not very different.
[Quotes are from that Canadian Sufi guy, I think.*] For the show - it can only be that stance. Dark blue with sharp lines. Shaded and reflected parts. Dream. Oneirics.
Raining, dark, wildness, coffee - it's three months - I'm WANTING - feeling the craziness I'll be visible in - they aren't - "enter into a relation with the animus" - Charlotte knew what she wanted - schlimm - feel it as wanting her but it's him in the dreams, anyone - feel for her predicament - why she was harsh and wouldn't help - what can I do to adjust it - the way in reality no one will be able - still dreaming he'll arrive - wanting to think how to imagine it so it doesn't make me wrong toward a real person - wanting to let it out, a whole full childish dreaming of love, with a real person - sorry I don't have it now with a real person to fight - she has to understand herself more - it was impossible because I'll always dream of a real man - being always in a false position - and yet. And she because she can never have her own pleasure has got to hate - it's diaphragm intensity thinking of her - held in the contradiction. I'd like to understand it as a relation I could make in myself so I don't have to shrink back into a woman and somehow seduce a man - so it could be peaceful and secure - can fantasy work do it. 22 Regards the life span as a physical dimension of a species on the same footing as linear or mass dimensions. The lifespan of various species varies inversely as its basal metabolic rate. An illusion - when the movement varies in intensity it is interpreted as near/far rather than more/less intense. - Is this an equivalence? Less intense is relayed slower. A small organism or even organ must have a higher intensity of body time, to live. Space and time seem to be alternates (as modes of attention). Time in one system is t1 in another system moving relative to it. If something has a very great amount of experienced time it could have very little mass. Biological time's universal constant. Speed of conduction 1-100 msec varying inversely with the diameter of the fiber. Changing speed of conduction - varying intensity either outside or inside the viewer - therefore changes experienced space-time. Difference of intensity from outside coded as frequency. the transduction of his simultaneity into our duration Slowness of learning - speed of perception. Pringle - complexity, order = the number of independent variable needed to define systems fully in space and time. Synchronization of oscillators can lead, in a population of oscillators, to an evolutionary increase of complexity of rhythm. Oscillators in closed loops: oscillatory wave-forms resembling electrical waves of cerebral cortex. It is our perception that compels us to perceive other processes as exponential. "Quartal." There is a translation to log arithmetic function already in the chemistry of perception. Dreaming/vision Inverse relation of outer and inner energy necessary for them to occur - attention measured by reaction time. Perceived time - anticipation. Causal and a-causal. A same living reality expressing itself in the (physical and psychic) state - "an entity that consists of formal structures, systems or images; and knowledge prior to consciousness. A certain pre-conscious orderedness. Numbers as qualitative - an equivalence between the essence of a thing and its position in space-time which is specified by number. I Ching. Causality the story of coming to be. Synchronicity the quality of altogetherness - things being there - then because they are exponents of the same quality/meaning. The whole of existence an un-sensable ordered continuum. "But its inherent dynamism manifests in images whose structure participates in that of the continuum." - What do I want to know. Acid - why I saw the clouds stop and start - why I saw the Assyrians - the emotional look of things. Sesshin - the pattern visions - being at rest on enjoyment of being - color - clearness - lightness - effort. What her time/space is. Anyone's, how to tell. How to move in scale by intention (impersonate an emotion). What I have is confused.
The hemispheres with different rates, in or out of synch Small writing - with J, intense recall of some things, 'objective,' independent, Carmichael, E, thinking slowly, reflecting, detail. Big writing emotional personal dependent, young, thinking in stabs, racing, centrifugal. Moving fast, having lots of time - driving, hockey, stepping in front of buses, wit. Moving slow - old people - errors - slow wit - bigness - watching inward delay for body - effort. Time going fast - conceptual ordering - very close attention - inner attention - sleep. His eyeglasses are telescopes because she can only see the near. She is a microscope time passes unobserved. Small time expanded, large time unobserved. She is a microscope time parts around. Expand small space. Expand small time. : by outside count time is flown. Complexity of what's being done / compared to - They're moving slow, their time is moving fast - their space is ordeal / or not seen. They're moving fast, their time is moving slow, their space is a pleasure.
23
Angela's garden - frenzy - not cautious - tearing - George imposing his camera - Angela dissatisfied - garden in a tearing way, feels like missing her - not allowing it either - looking into the autumn writing finding it lovely, being sure of it - seeing, in the window, a fat ass and belly - quite torn off centre, is it a hard wane, the writing that was in love with her - "to and from J Ismail." [page of plant lists]
Could get:
Elsewhere: basil, heart's-ease, myrtle 24 Dark morning - the dead heat pouring into my rooms - mourning that doubts - have we really left each other, is it really you I miss, when what would cure me is anyone wanting to hear me talk - anyone seeming to - any real fucking. We neither of us understood the loves are not differentiated. The landscapes we were for each other. The house I've been making for him in her country (is the house she made for us). You coot! You mistaken person! What do you want instead. - Why am I in this now, is it the money, is it having to do the show, is it not speaking to C anymore, is it winter body, is it child-love with no imagined terminus. 25 Paul sitting painting the dollhouse timbers. "Are you lonely?" Feeling the constriction saying "Yes I am," looking away. He's re-reading Don Juan. Catherine Liu typing her name, the smell of her family around her small person, the freedom I could feel teaching her, her odd garbled words. She indicates and doesn't speak, in Hong Kong they understand each other. Her factory will be closed for two days, they have no orders. Last night as the movie ended saying I am in a life, I don't want to be - desperate - anxiously rubrubrubrub in bed. Holtby's and Esther's stories of family indifference - May Sinclair. The women without resistance. Mothers who don't wish for their daughters' spirits. Something recognizable I haven't found written before. Incredulous seeing. She is giving me up for that. He is. What could I do - am I free now to talk to myself - how it seems is pressed to jump into another life - I have to go somewhere else - have another life this one is over - I don't have anything to do with Rhoda - I've cut myself off from Cheryl and Jam, Daphne won't have anything to do with me, with Trudy I have to watch myself. Other people I could like - seem to beware of me. On the street I look ugly. The new clothes are old. The money's gone and it's borrowing. Dark and wet - in the last bad winters I've had writing and someone to address - the writing is there from then but none of this can feel itself anything but maintenance. I'm not what I was. That haunting again. Not wanting the tone of the discussion of those books - not that problem, it has to be advanced for me. Haven't used the camera, haven't loved an image. I'm giving her up for this wastedness - who - walking from Chinatown remembering the wistful unconsciousnesses with Kiyooka - the disrupted - mother - then, is there a sane position I can find I'm in - that has been its feeling: I must find the position I am in, what do I have, what can I do, to be in life again - though I am in life - what then - the same as for years, to be in feeling and interest - interest in theory - yes but it's taking my time so I have none - she's there downstairs living, she isn't desperate - she's pretty, she has a good time where she goes, she doesn't mind not fucking, she has a lifetime companion - in the novels the little that's known about anyone but the vacant woman in the center - they're complaints, Dorothy's is praise. 26 Pressed to go to another life but having no The dreams of having to leave - is it not wanting to do the show because then it has to leave - dear baby we don't have to leave if we don't want. "The suppressed one" - the baby - the sister - the equivalences! Luggage - weighted downness. If younger sister has always meant that what was younger sister in herself - and Luke. The poet's house and the long canal. The slides dimming - the going under and uncanny light. "Learning to see in the dark." What I know - "chapters." Invoking blue lines. Jean thinking Paul is masculine attractiveness. Jean when she holds her face as inward. "I thought yours was the most alive hair I'd ever seen."
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